Yuki Takahashi

Although evidence suggests men are more generous to women than to men, it may stem from paternalism and could reverse when women excel in important skills for one's career success, such as cognitive skills. Using a dictator game, this paper studies whether male dictators allocate less to female receivers than to male receivers when these receivers have higher IQs than dictators. By exogenously varying the receivers' IQ relative to the dictators', I do not find evidence consistent with this hypothesis; if anything, male dictators allocate slightly more to female receivers with higher IQs than to male receivers with equivalent IQs. The results hold both in mean and distribution and are robust to the so-called ``beauty premium.'' Also, female dictators' allocations are qualitatively similar to male dictators. These findings suggest that women who excel in cognitive skills may not receive less favorable treatment than equally intelligent men in the labor market.

Although the gender gap in mathematics and sciences in OECD countries is negligible, female students are still less likely to major in STEM fields in college. One explanation that has received less attention in the literature is that STEM programs are predominantly male-dominated, which makes female students a minority. We study whether the gender ratio at colleges affects high school students' college choices and the extent to which it contributes to the gender gap in STEM programs. We begin by using administrative data to show that the gender ratio is highly persistent over time, with almost no changes over 21 years. We then use an incentivized discrete choice experiment and show that the gender ratio at colleges does affect both female and male students' college choices: both female and male students prefer gender-balanced college programs over those with a male or female majority. Students avoid programs where they will be a minority mainly because they expect it to be difficult to fit into such environments. A counterfactual analysis suggests that the low female student share in STEM programs reduces the likelihood of female students choosing STEM programs by 6.0 percentage points. Removing this constraint would increase the number of female students choosing STEM across the entire ability distribution. Thus, the gender ratio at colleges is an important factor for high school students' college choices, and making STEM programs more gender-balanced can help narrow the STEM gender gap without compromising the quality of applicants.

Managers decide on the promotion and dismissal of workers. To accurately evaluate the worker's performance, however, managers must pay attention to all workers, which can be difficult because attention is scarce, thereby allowing stereotypes to arise. In a controlled laboratory experiment with eye-tracking, we study how stereotypes affect managers' attention and evaluations of workers when not everyone can be tracked. We find that managers’ attention and evaluation are affected by stereotypes. Workers who are negatively stereotyped receive less attention when managers must identify the best performers, but they receive more attention when managers must identify the worst performers. These attention patterns roughly translate into evaluation accuracy. Importantly, these differences in attention and evaluation are not driven by workers’ true performance, and certain workers suffer more. Showing repeated performance information does not overrule stereotypes. We conclude that since attention is scarce, stereotypes affect these promotion and dismissal decisions, leading to suboptimal decisions as the best and worst performers are not accurately identified.

The underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) is widely studied, with growing recognition that gender gaps vary significantly across different STEM fields. Leveraging a curriculum reform at a US liberal arts college, we show that restructuring an introductory computer science course into a format emphasizing the discipline's broad social relevance increased the likelihood of female students majoring in computer science by 12.2 percentage points compared to their male counterparts. Furthermore, the reform significantly boosted the earnings of female students in the labor market, increasing their average salaries by 15.7% more than male students. We find no evidence that female students' academic outcomes deteriorated following the reform. Overall, our results suggest that men and women respond differently to STEM curricula and that curriculum design can serve as a viable policy lever in closing gender gaps in STEM fields that still experience gender disparity.

While successful teamwork often involves correcting colleagues' mistakes, it may have negative interpersonal consequences. In an experiment, I show that it also has negative economic consequences: individuals are less willing to collaborate with those who have corrected them, even when the correction benefits the team. The data are consistent with negative feedback aversion: individuals who initially received positive feedback about their ability are significantly less willing to collaborate with those who corrected their mistakes, but not with those who corrected their right actions. Additionally, I find that men, but not women, are more tolerant of women who corrected their right actions. It is potentially due to men's beliefs about women's abilities, making women's corrections of their right actions less ego-threatening. This reluctance to work with those who provide corrective feedback can undermine teamwork, and mixed-gender teams may attract less competent women due to gendered sorting.

Light abuses and threats to receive them at home can deteriorate individuals' well-being, even in the absence of severe physical injury. Leveraging Russia's criminal law reform that decriminalized minor domestic violence, I first confirm that the number of domestic violence incidents classified as criminal offenses against female partners indeed decreased sharply after the reform. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I then show that the reform reduced married women's life satisfaction, increased depression, and increased college-educated married women's alcohol intake. Suggestive evidence indicates that the reform contributed to a decline in new marriages, while the divorce rate remained unchanged. These changes are unlikely to stem from shifts in violence outside the household, as there were no significant changes in gender-based violence or other crimes during the same period. These findings suggest that even minor intimate partner violence decreases married women's well-being and highlights the importance of legal institutions in addressing household violence.